When we think of teaching history today, the vast amount of information available to students and researchers on the web offers both challenges and opportunities for building historical thinking skills.  We want students to be able to distinguish between reliable and less-reliable sources; to view information providers critically with an understanding of their strengths and limitations; and to also be aware that—although the internet appears to be a vast collection of knowledge—there is much that doesn’t exist or hasn’t been catalogued or indexed yet, so that relying solely on digital resources—no matter how rich—is going to limit the success of their historical work.

Almost all students turn to Google as a means of beginning their historical research.  But as the readings in this course have shown, Google’s algorithm and the way it “ranks” its findings are colored by its need to enhance its revenue.  Students need to be aware that a Google ranking is not in order of importance or even of relevance; that items that appear at the top of the list may be sponsored or otherwise generated by their own search histories.  Simple exercises like performing the same search on different search platforms, or rewording search terms slightly to see how the results are affected, or simply by performing the same search on different days or logged in as a different user all could be instructive ways to show students the need to approach any web search with caution.

Another way the internet gives a false impression of being a storehouse of “all knowledge” is exemplified by the Google Books project.  The somewhat grandiose aim of this undertaking was to scan all existing books to form a kind of super library.  The ability to search across thousands of titles to develop theories of how language changed over time is just one possibility that excited digital humanities scholars over the past decade.  However, as Sarah Zheng in her Wired article pointed out, Google Books consists primarily of books available in university libraries published over the last two and a half centuries, with a preponderance of scientific texts.  Searching for words or phrases is going to be skewed by this bias.  Further, the limitations of optical scanning itself means that oddities of typesetting might lead to spurious results.  (The favorite example is the change in typography that occurred in representing the letter “s”; earlier texts use a symbol that is closer to a contemporary “f” and thus words like “save” might be read as “fave.”)

Wikipedia is another “authoritative” source that students (and researchers) often use in beginning their research on a topic.  However, it too has its limitations as we’ve seen in the readings in this module.  Wikipedia’s editors have set rules for the inclusive of new entries based on their being at least two “reliable sources” that can be cited to validate their addition.  This skews Wikipedia towards information that has already been “approved” by the academy.  The stories of people of color, non-Western peoples, and people of different sexual orientations tend to be underrepresented in these sources.  Thus, even this crowd sourced encyclopedia that would appear to be more inclusive in its approach is not as open as we might think.

I don’t want to give the impression that the availability of information on the internet is a net negative for students undertaking historical research; online sources still offer so much more access than was available in the past to vast materials—including text, audio, video, and objects—that it clearly is a net plus for anyone interested in tackling a history project.  And there is literally something for everyone, whether they are visual learners who prefer to watch a brief video or slide show, or ones who prefer to dig deep into diaries, newspaper archives, or other primary sources.  It’s just important to balance our enthusiasm for this goldmine of materials with a realization that the same historical thinking skills that applied in the “old world” of dusty books and papers is just as relevant—if not more so—in today’s digital world.